The Meaning of Gravity
by Elegy Fading
Summary: There has always been something between Mulder and Scully, a kinetic spark that holds them together despite all that they've been through. "A pair-bonded two, burning the glassy firmament."


**The Meaning of Gravity**

~The last thing he tells her before she sleeps.~

The last thing he tells her before she sleeps is that the limited weight of a White Dwarf is 1.4 times that of the sun. He wants to believe she'll dream of partnering stars spinning each other forever into the realms of the unknown. A pair-bonded two, burning the glassy firmament.

Mulder knows her dreams are wicked, unfair things—knows she dreams herself wicked in them every time. Because of this and because he is afraid too and because he is only just learning how to love, he touches her forehead before he lifts her from his couch. He wants to anoint her, exalt her.

He's seen her exalted for years now.

He holds her in his arms and stands turned towards his lonely apartment window, very still. Old soul or no, she deserves to be held in ancient light, he thinks. To be lit by a journey's end. In his arms she is too small, too light, a body made for the sea. He has realized of late that he has a habit of praying for her, and too her—has done it for years but never considered them prayers, only his desperate yearnings. Mashing guilty images of hands moving, of sharp little female teeth, together with a few sparse words—

safe, truth, peace, Scully, love—oh, love.

Tonight he prays for her, feels the blood moving though her in his arms. "Fifteen inches a second," she would tell him, "in the arteries. Slower in the veins." She would tell him were she awake. It is night and she is not awake.

~Very far, Mulder.~

She comes over while it's still light out. Even in the hall she recognizes the gloomy beginning. Mulder's apartment accommodates dusk in the oddest ways, absorbing the light into corners and cups and dust, until everything reminds her of him—him and his Peter Pan shadow of mystery.

Of misery, she thinks but stops herself.

She's seen him score a three-pointer with her eyes trained on him, seen him imitate Mr. Potato Head, seen him smile at the sky. Sorrow picked a difficult place to land when it chose Fox Mulder for a runway strip.

When Scully arrives, the tenant in the suite before Mulder's is daring to play Supertramp with the speakers set down on the hardwood. Still, she thinks of Padgett and considers that sometimes a standard THC loving hooligan is the best neighbor you can hope for.

Now it's night and there is wine, fragrant and stagnating on the table where his feet are. She came over and it got dark and now there is wine. It is the simplicity of it that keeps her wary, keeps her savoring the dry taste, half-sweet the way they've always kept things.

They broke the cork in the Shiraz, trying to open it. They broke down into a few cautious giggles next, when Mulder succeeded in pushing the remains of the cork into the bottle not out of it. They broke their voices, jaggedly, hungrily, speaking a very little about things that mattered very little to either of them. (They broke each other's hearts, she thinks, but that began long ago and was very melodramatic.) After a time she said, "That poster—the Andromeda Galaxy, right?" and he grinned and over-poured her glass.

"An elliptical galaxy."

"No way, Scully, Andromedas' a spiral."

She licked her lip at him skeptically. He threatened to look it up.

"Figures you'd have an astronomy book."

"Astrology, Astronomy, Astral Projection—you name it, Scully."

"I know, right beside that cassette tape marked, 'Ass-trixs and Exclamation Points', right?"

"I maintain: I thought it was a video guide on making those keyboard emoticons that have gotten so popular lately." To his credit, she still couldn't make him blush. Instead they sat in silence before reverting to form:

"I guess I keep that poster up there to remind me about distance."

"How big the universe is?" That was her.

"Or how small we are," she threw out a second later, while he mumbled something to that exact effect. Their gazes crossed each other and she looked away, embarrassed by the commonality of thought. Her throat hurt suddenly, but not for any reason of health—well, mental health, maybe.

She swallowed. "It's- it's 2.4 million light years away, I believe."

"Just down the block, hey Scully?" She gave him a look for that one. Not far. Of course it wasn't far.

-But the wine had made her romantic and coupled with Supertramp requesting her to 'give a little bit' from the floorboards down the hall, she felt compelled to disagree with science for once.

"It's very far, Mulder," she said. She raised a tawny eyebrow at him. Could swallow her wine in defiance, but could not say what she was thinking.

In response to her empty glass Mulder took a swallow of his own, lingered to inhale the tart burgundy scent, watched the liquid swirl. Everything he does is out of order, she thought dizzily.

"Kind of like us," he said.

"Pardon?" she tried to hold her mouth in disapproval. Failed.

"Distance and perspective, right? Kind of like us."

Failed. Failed. Failed.

It was what she had been thinking.

She looked away from him towards the window. It's out there, she thought. Andromeda. And she felt herself prickle for him, felt the distinctly sexual wick of heat between her legs. He always made this happen to her so quickly, thoroughly... she almost resented him for it—like he had overturned a lantern inside of her and spilt the heated oil, left her feeling dashed.

She sat beside him on his bachelor's couch and found she could not look at him—could not look at anything but the wine in his glass, still swirling from the motion of his wrist.

~She warns herself twice over the course of the evening.~

She warns herself twice over the course of the evening—once when they touch glasses and cheers to nothing and she realizes she feels at peace here. Again when her shoes come off, falling loud as clopping horses feet onto his dusty floor. She warns herself twice: she cannot, she will not fall asleep here again.

Kissing on New Years aside, she's still Dana Scully and she will eat 'lite' cream cheese and continue to perfect that marcel in her hair each morning and she will not fall asleep on her partner's couch for the second time in as many weeks, damn it. She will not.

But then the hooligan next door finally turns the music down, and Mulder flicks all the lights out so that they may watch a movie on mute and continue to talk, and her shoes are off and Mulder's couch smells nicely of Mulder, and by the time sleep hits her, Mulder's been aware of her nearing unconsciousness for much longer than she has.

He speaks to her for a while, of mass and of gravity. Universal invariants he knows she likes. He watches her sleep and finds he thinks it must be like the sea, her night-mind.

Rocky waters mostly, though, and he frowns.

He knows her father used to leave her all the time—come back with skin toughened by salt and the rest toughened by other men's crass natures. And Mulder knows, too, that a child's mind can follow a loved one even farther out to sea than there is a sea to follow. He imagines her dreams (Pfaster aside) are of elusive white whales and peg-legged men who leave, and that sometimes she isn't sure if it's the whale she hates or the man. He'd like to give her a sturdy boat to brave the rough waters. To lie curled with her in the small bottom amongst the oars and netting.

He finds it charming, remarkable, that when she speaks to him her eyes are wide and blue with wakefulness but in her voice he hears the timbre drop and he knows she'll be out in a glance.

His dainty narcoleptic.

He wants to kiss her sleeping. Wants equally to kiss her into waking and has reason to hope, recently, that he might just get his chance some night. In the mean time she calms him too, like a swallow of warm milk.

By the time she's out the movie's almost ended and they've been pouring over the particulars of The Chandrasekar Limit for a good two thirds of it.

When the horror with Pfaster went down for the second time she came to stay with him. After the first night he kicked himself profusely and spent an hour taking down the mirror on his ceiling—the one he didn't remember putting there. She hadn't said anything about it but she conceded to take the bed the second night and he knew. If he'd been thrown into a mirror he wouldn't want to wake up to his own reflection either. Hell, he didn't want to wake up to his own reflection half the time anyway—besides, the damn thing kept making him think of that scene from 'Bride of Chuckie'.

Tonight though he figures he's probably safe in assuming she won't mind sleeping in his bed, provided the bed is sans snuggle-buddy that is.

Oh, she'll wake up embarrassed of course, but only a little and she can hide her face behind his biggest coffee cup until she finds her equanimity again—that and her blazer which he suspects has been eaten by some couch dwelling 'Alf' creature.

For the time being Mulder speaks to her of Quasars and Neutron Stars and things he knows are on the outer reaches of possibility—on the outer reaches of plausibility even, and yet she believes them. The Hubble is up there whispering their light back as truth.

Beside him she is not afraid of couch dwelling creatures and presses her roman little nose into the cushions. Her breath, he notices, trembles but deepens.

~Though she tries to do it other ways, she is always angry.~

She drops asleep with Nosferatu on the TV on mute.

By the way Mulder is able to ignore the Vampire's infamous magnetism she guesses he's seen the film at least twice before. She, on the other hand falls into the rumbling volume of their voices, turns her face towards the screen and is out.

She blames it on Melissa— her narcolepsy and the effect a television has on her—her sister making her stay up all those nights when their parents had left the older sibling in charge.

"I'm the sitter and I say you have to stay up and watch TV with me."

Dana, shaking her head and turning back to the book she had to finish reading before morning.

"Come on, DK, there's probably stuff with sex in it at this hour and no Mom around to change the channel before they show anything!"

"I have to finish this. Watch television yourself."

But by this point Melissa had crossed her arms and gotten Scully-stubborn. "Anyway Dana, you can't even read that 'King' guy yet. And even if you can, Mom won't think so if I tell her about it. Now come on, watch TV with me."

So Dana would watch television with her sister and finish the book later anyway and sneak it back onto the adult bookshelf before dawn…

...and now she hears Mulder's voice and feels her eyes begging her for REM sleep, immediately, if at all possible and she falls hard-out, as though on cue. She thinks maybe Mulder's hand is near her on the couch but doesn't move to investigate. It's a comfort anyway, believing he's there. Letting that belief be enough.

She closes her eyes and feels fierce in the face of her nightmares. She read 'Salem's Lot' at eight years old, was brave enough to kiss her partner by thirty-seven. Already, she tastes gunpowder in her mouth and she thinks, I can handle this. I can handle this.

Of the few men who've carried her to bed, Mulder is the only one whose strong arms don't wake her during the journey. She'd like to think that didn't unnerve her. She knows it's about the kind of trust your body gives without your approval. She wishes she knew—has never known—how to simply let a thing happen.

In any event, it is strange later, because she dreams of running, of tearing at live flesh with her refined hands, finally of her own face coming towards her and she doesn't realize it's a mirror until she hits. Hard. –And then she wakes.

In his bed.

She's fallen from her bed at home before now, tearing at the covers for long seconds after her conscious mind has told her to stop. Stop. It was just a dream. She's come awake, only once mercifully, with an imagined Smith and Wesson kicking in her hands, dreaming the barrel hot enough to burn her. Mulder's house is full of junk-shop hand-me-down furniture. He keeps his toothbrush at the kitchen sink. There is a tenderness she feels towards this space that makes her ashamed of herself for bringing these dark dreams in.

For not being able to crawl up under his chin where he sleeps on his couch and whisper her hate into his chest in clear human speech.

In her dreams—though she tries to do it other ways—she is always angry, and Pfaster dies at her hands. Every time.

~He was a martyr once.~

It has become recurring, now, that she wakes herself snarling at Pfaster. Lately anyway it's Pfaster, and Mulder doesn't need to know there were others before that. Always these rage sounds, coming out of her, weeks after the event. Latent as bruises on a cadaver, she thinks.

This time though, she's in Mulder's bed—he's in the doorway, his gaze is away from her by a degree, allowing her privacy. With the hallway light a low wattage behind him, his form is odd and curious as dark matter. MACHOS and WIMPS, she thinks and would laugh over him if she weren't terrified.

She doesn't toss in her sleep. Isn't sure how she knows this, but she does, and she suspects the only reason Mulder is standing there alert is because he was watching her anyway. She wonders if Mulder thought her dreams were peaceful before that animal sound tore her awake. She can feel it still: the fleer of her lips—her mouth feels torn. That's it Dana, take stock. Look around, reorient, and calm down.

She's in a dark room—his, naturally—the sound of the fish-tank, aquatic and far off and she's scared. God, she's so scared.

Of the trunks of cars,

Skyland Mountain,

of fluke-men,

of toxic ergots and that god-damn El Chupacabra;

of blood on her pillow,

blood on her philtrum,

of nebulous galaxies flickering out as though they were only bug-lights on a run down porch and scared of their own personal nebulous lives. Hers, and Mulder's.

She's afraid of Pfaster, of Padget, of Ed Jerse who have each put their hands on her in places Mulder has not, and she's afraid of these men who have made her think so fiercely of her gun.

Ed's hands between her legs and it was snowing outside and her pantyhose were much wetter than she was…

Or Pfaster binding her hands while she wondered if his own smelled like the shampoo of his last victim…

And breathing shallow through a gag or trying not to gag and thinking, 'if I had to I could—,' thinking, 'I will not let him—,' refusing to wait for Mulder to come and save her. Refusing sometimes to be saved.

And in Mulder's apartment it is still night and the dreams are beginning to fade.

Mulder stands in the lit doorway while they wait for her to calm. He does not speak, does not try to admonish the cobwebs of her horror or even shoulder them. He would have once—would have tried and hurt them both. He was a martyr once and never did understand the difference between a wound and the way it was healing. Now he only watches her from across the room. He's such a wild package of bones and mostly water. Not to mention that brilliant, chimerical mind.

His hands twitch, wanting her, and she sees but he does not move into the room. He will not.

Not yet.

For her part, her heart is clocking NASCAR engine speeds. It's always been an easy transition for her, from fear to arousal. Any Stockholm patient will tell you that, she thinks. For the thousandth time she wants him to use those wild impulses he keeps such a tight lid on to make her shake apart. For Mulder she could make a different kind of animal noise she's sure he would love.

Oh, Mulder, she thinks.

The sheets on his bed are fine and heavy. They smell like neither her nor him. He doesn't sleep here. She takes this in. Sees him standing way over there and closes her eyes, thinks: Soon.

She knows sometimes she'll ride him hard on that couch of his instead, and sleep on him like a benevolent succubus and that'll be good too.

So it's while she's weighing and balancing the benefits of sleeping in his clothes versus sleeping in the nude that he comes to her—not any time in the future but now, right now. There's still the remnant of a sneer on her face that she can't get rid of but she tries, hard, for him. His shape becomes darker, as he nears her.

Oh, Mulder. Oh, Mulder.

At first when he touches her in darkness it's with only his lips—she thinks it's with his fingers, it's that delicate. But it has been a long winter. Both of their mouths are a little chapped and pretty soon she realizes her mistake.

This is a rasping kiss of mostly breath and stubble. Daring and careful—she never would have though it a sexual kiss until she met Mulder and began to understand the way brilliance could learn to desire. She thinks at first he kisses her to draw out the stubborn anger lingering around her lips. It's so him, she realizes: classic Mulder MO—like sucking the poison out of a snake's bite. A terrifying, unexplained snake's bite. She lets him do this much—sobs once into his mouth and is done with it. Mulder licks her day old lipstick. He kisses her with his hands far from her and his stiff beautiful desire held far from her as well. They unfold in a way that suggests not restraint, but belief: that this thing between them is not only inevitable but desired.

This is going to happen, Mulder.

I know, Scully. I know. Soon.

This, oh—Mulder, this is really going to happen.

Yes, Scully. Oh yes. Soonsoonsoon—

And she thinks he says it aloud, Soon, but she swallows the sound so she can only know it by taste. She is Pomander tasting apples, still chaste.

~The sound she makes, so deliciously off key.~

Eventually she is the one who breaks their battle with distance.

Breaks the one with sound too, though he didn't realize they were silent and she didn't realize she wasn't. The noise she makes is very quiet and deliciously off key. Townsend, he thinks, would have killed to be able to emulate that. And then her hand is grabbing his shoulder and she spreads her legs for him, almost wide. He can smell hotel soap on her, odd and clean—arousal too.

'Gravity,' he thinks, and also that it is right they affect each other this way. Steadily, in darkness. She moves again against the mattress—his mattress—showing him how much she wants him, trying to keep herself from showing him.

Her restraint is lovely; he's always thought so. Always wanted to break that restraint though, too. It's the same way he's fantasized about messing up her hair. He's as immature as a child to a point, and he wants to faze her. Then to straighten her skirt afterwards, brush her hair to a gleam before making her come all over again.

It is only now, two hours before dawn in his celibate bed with the clean, clean sheets that he realizes he can have this. Seven years and two hours before dawn and he can have this. Will have this with logical, supercilious Special Agent Crypto Zoologist M.D. and Covert Tattoo Bearer Extraordinaire, Dana Katherine Scully.

Eroticism on a Sunday. The Catholic Church would be so pleased.

But for now he's begun moving away from her again, as though continuing in his own predestined orbit and she in hers. It's a tricky extraction, in the dark with their limbs reluctant to relinquish each other, but she's letting him go. All sinning aside, they were never going to do this tonight. Soon. Soon. Now is not the time.

Her eyes stay visible longer than the rest of her face as he exits so he backs away from her, enchanted; until he is at the door and he can no longer smell that body smell, until he's in the hall and he can't here her ragged breath, until his hand hits the light switch. Before he flicks it off he sees himself trembling like a petit mal sufferer, though there's nothing 'bad' about this.

He sits on his couch in the dark, bouncing his leg.

This is the true meaning of 'wired'.

Beyond the, 'I-worshipped-Timothy-Leery-in-university-and-tried-speed-hoping-to-expand-my-mind,' standard of wired with which he is familiar.

He cracks sunflower seeds in the dark to no affect.

The house is silent, all dark matter and potential.

~This, she thinks, is the Universe.~

Mulder stays awake the rest of the night—wants to wake her with the dawn. He wants it obsessively, with the innocence of a child. He makes coffee, eats a package of soup noodles and flavoring dry, rips the arms off another t-shirt, and falls asleep at last, just before she wakes mid-morning.

She finds him on the couch with loose threads stuck all over him. She drinks some coffee in a juice cup and leaves the cup in front of him with her lipstick on it. Before she goes she touches his thigh, on the inside, high up and intimate. She can feel his pulse here through his jeans.

This, she thinks, is the Universe.

This brilliant man—Cat in the Hat to her Goldfish—him inviting chaos and her beginning to let it in, and her sleeping in his apartment, and them out there on the event horizon, the point of no return. Believing in each other and sometimes, sometimes aliens. They've been searching so long for this place. A place of tenderness and truth.

They go there where nothing is waiting.

They find everything waiting there.


End file.
